SOURCE: “The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence,” in Love and Death in the American Novel, Revised Edition, Dell Publishing, 1966, pp. 430-505.

In the following excerpt, Fiedler discusses the idea of despair in Melville's works, asserting that Melville's style changed from gothic to sentimental as his career progressed.

Melville was truer, finally, to the vision of blackness, which he pretended to have discovered in Hawthorne, than was Hawthorne himself. The reality of damnation he never denied; but the meaning of it, for one committed to a skeptical and secular view, he questioned. Especially in his later works, he presented the “mystery of iniquity” in such complexly ironical contexts that the wariest of readers is occasionally baffled. Nevertheless, he kept faith throughout his fiction not only with the gothic vision in general, but with the Faustian theme; creating, along two main lines of descent, a...